- Apr 21, 2020
- 136
- 163
Unreal Engine Kalyskah [v0.25.9] [Nobre Lobo]
- Jul 6, 2017
- 11
- 3
If you do put it on Steam, be sure to utilize proper pricing. If people see some big number they'll back off from it. Game that did pricing really good (and sales) was She Will Punish Them. Can use as an example
Well, I've started to play this game today and what I can say is: wonderful!
You see, very few developers are brave enough to try to develop a 3D, Unreal Engine game. Most stick with the good ol' RenPy VN's as they're easier and players always know what to expect.
So firstly I'd like to praise Kalyskah for bringing this for us. I'm currently dealing with a move to another city so I'm a bit short on cash, therefore not abble to support the game yet - but do expect me do join your Patreon ASAP.
About the game per se: the game runs smoothly, controls are good (this is usually a problem on 3D games, like LifePlay for instance), so is the story, dialogues, graphics, etc. and the sex scenes are something else, although rare (only mechanic that I didn't like is the stamina part).
This will definetly be one of the best games every made when finished - if it ever reaches that (I'm really hoping so).
You see, very few developers are brave enough to try to develop a 3D, Unreal Engine game. Most stick with the good ol' RenPy VN's as they're easier and players always know what to expect.
So firstly I'd like to praise Kalyskah for bringing this for us. I'm currently dealing with a move to another city so I'm a bit short on cash, therefore not abble to support the game yet - but do expect me do join your Patreon ASAP.
About the game per se: the game runs smoothly, controls are good (this is usually a problem on 3D games, like LifePlay for instance), so is the story, dialogues, graphics, etc. and the sex scenes are something else, although rare (only mechanic that I didn't like is the stamina part).
This will definetly be one of the best games every made when finished - if it ever reaches that (I'm really hoping so).
Just a question, I was playing an older version (0.13.2 I think) and when updated to 0.16.8, the save no longer worked.
Will this happen frequently? When it does, are official complete saves released for the public? Because in that case, maybe some people will feel discouraged to try it out before it's really out.
Will this happen frequently? When it does, are official complete saves released for the public? Because in that case, maybe some people will feel discouraged to try it out before it's really out.
Thank you for your kind words =D
Hello!
This is not something we expect to happen very often, but it might happen again at some point since there are still a few things related to the game save\load system that need improvement.Our game is not even in pre-alpha yet and that's something to consider. So I'm sorry for the inconvenience and we are trying our best to avoid this happening way too often.
Hello IG88a, thank you for your review!
I would just like to discuss with you a bit of the topics you raised because it might help you to understand why the game is like it is. I see every 1 star review as a player that had expectations on our game and then got frustrated by something, either be a bad experience in terms of bugs or confusion with the story or other mechanics. And I think it's nice to talk with these people to understand the reasoning and then maybe we can find a middle ground and change things so new players don't get as frustrated as you =)
How long have we been developing the game?
The game as it is right now, is not the result of 5 years of work, for the first 3 to 4 years we were building the necessary framework and community to allow us to create the world and start to make the quest system of it. So the game changed a lot during this period. We started with a sidescroller that was a proof of concept, then we changed the whole art and the level still having a sidescroller. We even did a few tests in different types of open-world until we reached the current format. Now we are almost done with building the core mechanics even though we don't have many quests. Why do we do it? Because once the core is done, scaling the project will be much faster. For example, we are being capable this month, of building the first quest from scratch and release it within 20 days, which is a great achievement judging by the fact that before having the frameworks we had to manually create every event when a player went from point A to point B and have this very slow programming development.
Also, with the help of our supporters through the years, we have been able to expand the team and in the past month, we got two new animators and a new character artist. With that in mind, we do know that what we aim to do can be completed since the speed things will be developing:
Now about your ideas:
1 - Design around a central HUB:
This is not really necessary because Level Design is not a problem for us. We have people that can add new areas as long as they are not too big, and the core parts of what will be the place where our first chapter of the game will happen is already done.
So now our goal is to write down more quests and add more events happening in this world so the player who is exploring can find new content and quests to do. The story of this area is already written so changing the whole game to something like we can see in Dark Souls, where you have Firelink that is the main hub where you do everything wouldn't work for what we aim for.
2 - Radiant Dungeon combat Loop
Although I said that Level Design is not a problem for us at the moment, this is true because most of what we need is already done, and what we need to expand is only details here and there to add places of interest. If we go in a direction that we would count more with dungeons than a story for the player to explore, this would be way much more expansive and the time players would spend on the game would actually be smaller. For example, if we want to add another dungeon as big as the first one, our level designer would need to work more or less 2 months on it, and this would only add 20 minutes of gameplay at tops. And the other solution would be to hire more level designers or increase the time our current one can work on the project, and to do so we would need to take the budget away from the story writer, the animators and maybe even the programmer. It wouldn't be worth it because we have made several polls on our Patreon and people who follow us are more interested in the story and in having new cutscenes for them to watch.
3 - Companion progression through combat/romance
We have two different things planned on that side: On one hand, we will have main NPC characters that will react to Kalyskah's choice and follow her on the main plotline. On the other hand, we won't be having a companion system as you can see in games such as Skyrim. This means that the NPCs will be there in important times and important choices, but they won't follow Kalykah around for two big reasons: The first one is that the narrative we want to build is one where Kalyskah is trying to figure things out by herself on this changing world she woke up in. And the second one is because implementing a satisfying companion experience is something extremely complex and even AAA games can't get it right most of the time, which makes companions usually more annoying than helpful to the players.
Now about the framework, that we already got. The game might look small right now but there are many things in the back-end that are done. And now our job is pretty much to get the more quest written and put into the game while we fix bugs and add some polishment to areas that are needed. But the skeleton of what we need is there. Changing this skeleton would slow us down and also disappoint the people that are following our game for a while and are already aware of the direction we are going.
About the scope: I must that it is actually something feasible! We have people on the team that have been in the game's industry for quite a while and I myself am graduated in game design. That doesn't mean that we are not flawed, but it means that we can see what is and what is not possible for us to pull up judging by our capabilities, and in terms of mechanics, everything we are proposing to do are things that we know that given some time and working step by step, it can be done. =D
Female Protagonist framing
We are not planning to do either of those things you mentioned. Yes, right now at the dungeon we have the negotiation system with the acolytes where Kalyskah can charm them and then have sex. This is a thing that will eventually be removed from the game so we can implement the new mechanics: Where negotiation with seduction will be possible before the combat starts, but not after defeat. This way we won't make it look like she's being coerced into having sex, it will be written in a way where she's using her seduction skills to manipulate people.
About the "dumb slut" framing, Kalyskah is a smart woman. We don't have a corruption system on our game exactly because for many games the more corrupt the character gets, the dumber or the more controlled by their desires they will also get, and this usually means that players that are more interested in seeing the erotic content will feel like they don't actually have a choice.
So the way we are doing this is that Kalyskah will increase\decrease her compassion and her dominant personality during the game. That's because she is a vampire, and her choices spin more around whether she should treat humans as cattle or as friends. And her choice to have sex or to seduce won't be blocked by this mechanic. We consider that since the player is the one in control over Kalyskah, we don't want to make them feel like they have options blocked because they "didn't grinded slutness enough with random events".
About the protagonist choice:
Choosing between female, futa and male protagonists is an impossible task. This is about Kalyskah and her story. Giving a protagonist choice would be as if someone is wanting to play The Witcher with someone other than Geralt, which wouldn't work, would be a whole different game.
About what you wrote on "suck a guard's cock". Remember that in that particular scene, Kalyskah can actually go to the stables to pretend that she will do what the guard is asking her to do, but then she can just say "Change of plans" and bite him without even touching him. Also, even while she is at the scene, the player ALWAYS have the choice to stand up and leave or to bite him as well. So if Kalyskah will indeed blow him, is entirely on the player's hand.
I hope I could get some of your questions answered.
I would just like to discuss with you a bit of the topics you raised because it might help you to understand why the game is like it is. I see every 1 star review as a player that had expectations on our game and then got frustrated by something, either be a bad experience in terms of bugs or confusion with the story or other mechanics. And I think it's nice to talk with these people to understand the reasoning and then maybe we can find a middle ground and change things so new players don't get as frustrated as you =)
How long have we been developing the game?
The game as it is right now, is not the result of 5 years of work, for the first 3 to 4 years we were building the necessary framework and community to allow us to create the world and start to make the quest system of it. So the game changed a lot during this period. We started with a sidescroller that was a proof of concept, then we changed the whole art and the level still having a sidescroller. We even did a few tests in different types of open-world until we reached the current format. Now we are almost done with building the core mechanics even though we don't have many quests. Why do we do it? Because once the core is done, scaling the project will be much faster. For example, we are being capable this month, of building the first quest from scratch and release it within 20 days, which is a great achievement judging by the fact that before having the frameworks we had to manually create every event when a player went from point A to point B and have this very slow programming development.
Also, with the help of our supporters through the years, we have been able to expand the team and in the past month, we got two new animators and a new character artist. With that in mind, we do know that what we aim to do can be completed since the speed things will be developing:
You must be registered to see the links
Now about your ideas:
1 - Design around a central HUB:
This is not really necessary because Level Design is not a problem for us. We have people that can add new areas as long as they are not too big, and the core parts of what will be the place where our first chapter of the game will happen is already done.
So now our goal is to write down more quests and add more events happening in this world so the player who is exploring can find new content and quests to do. The story of this area is already written so changing the whole game to something like we can see in Dark Souls, where you have Firelink that is the main hub where you do everything wouldn't work for what we aim for.
2 - Radiant Dungeon combat Loop
Although I said that Level Design is not a problem for us at the moment, this is true because most of what we need is already done, and what we need to expand is only details here and there to add places of interest. If we go in a direction that we would count more with dungeons than a story for the player to explore, this would be way much more expansive and the time players would spend on the game would actually be smaller. For example, if we want to add another dungeon as big as the first one, our level designer would need to work more or less 2 months on it, and this would only add 20 minutes of gameplay at tops. And the other solution would be to hire more level designers or increase the time our current one can work on the project, and to do so we would need to take the budget away from the story writer, the animators and maybe even the programmer. It wouldn't be worth it because we have made several polls on our Patreon and people who follow us are more interested in the story and in having new cutscenes for them to watch.
3 - Companion progression through combat/romance
We have two different things planned on that side: On one hand, we will have main NPC characters that will react to Kalyskah's choice and follow her on the main plotline. On the other hand, we won't be having a companion system as you can see in games such as Skyrim. This means that the NPCs will be there in important times and important choices, but they won't follow Kalykah around for two big reasons: The first one is that the narrative we want to build is one where Kalyskah is trying to figure things out by herself on this changing world she woke up in. And the second one is because implementing a satisfying companion experience is something extremely complex and even AAA games can't get it right most of the time, which makes companions usually more annoying than helpful to the players.
Now about the framework, that we already got. The game might look small right now but there are many things in the back-end that are done. And now our job is pretty much to get the more quest written and put into the game while we fix bugs and add some polishment to areas that are needed. But the skeleton of what we need is there. Changing this skeleton would slow us down and also disappoint the people that are following our game for a while and are already aware of the direction we are going.
About the scope: I must that it is actually something feasible! We have people on the team that have been in the game's industry for quite a while and I myself am graduated in game design. That doesn't mean that we are not flawed, but it means that we can see what is and what is not possible for us to pull up judging by our capabilities, and in terms of mechanics, everything we are proposing to do are things that we know that given some time and working step by step, it can be done. =D
Female Protagonist framing
We are not planning to do either of those things you mentioned. Yes, right now at the dungeon we have the negotiation system with the acolytes where Kalyskah can charm them and then have sex. This is a thing that will eventually be removed from the game so we can implement the new mechanics: Where negotiation with seduction will be possible before the combat starts, but not after defeat. This way we won't make it look like she's being coerced into having sex, it will be written in a way where she's using her seduction skills to manipulate people.
About the "dumb slut" framing, Kalyskah is a smart woman. We don't have a corruption system on our game exactly because for many games the more corrupt the character gets, the dumber or the more controlled by their desires they will also get, and this usually means that players that are more interested in seeing the erotic content will feel like they don't actually have a choice.
So the way we are doing this is that Kalyskah will increase\decrease her compassion and her dominant personality during the game. That's because she is a vampire, and her choices spin more around whether she should treat humans as cattle or as friends. And her choice to have sex or to seduce won't be blocked by this mechanic. We consider that since the player is the one in control over Kalyskah, we don't want to make them feel like they have options blocked because they "didn't grinded slutness enough with random events".
About the protagonist choice:
Choosing between female, futa and male protagonists is an impossible task. This is about Kalyskah and her story. Giving a protagonist choice would be as if someone is wanting to play The Witcher with someone other than Geralt, which wouldn't work, would be a whole different game.
About what you wrote on "suck a guard's cock". Remember that in that particular scene, Kalyskah can actually go to the stables to pretend that she will do what the guard is asking her to do, but then she can just say "Change of plans" and bite him without even touching him. Also, even while she is at the scene, the player ALWAYS have the choice to stand up and leave or to bite him as well. So if Kalyskah will indeed blow him, is entirely on the player's hand.
I hope I could get some of your questions answered.
I'll start by saying I appreciate that you guys are active and take feedback seriously. Cut above. I was actually considering PM'ing you as well after looking back in the thread to see you keep tabs and respond to critique and suggestion but you beat me to the punch.Hello IG88a, thank you for your review!
I would just like to discuss with you a bit of the topics you raised because it might help you to understand why the game is like it is. I see every 1 star review as a player that had expectations on our game and then got frustrated by something, either be a bad experience in terms of bugs or confusion with the story or other mechanics. And I think it's nice to talk with these people to understand the reasoning and then maybe we can find a middle ground and change things so new players don't get as frustrated as you =)
How long have we been developing the game?
The game as it is right now, is not the result of 5 years of work, for the first 3 to 4 years we were building the necessary framework and community to allow us to create the world and start to make the quest system of it. So the game changed a lot during this period. We started with a sidescroller that was a proof of concept, then we changed the whole art and the level still having a sidescroller. We even did a few tests in different types of open-world until we reached the current format. Now we are almost done with building the core mechanics even though we don't have many quests. Why do we do it? Because once the core is done, scaling the project will be much faster. For example, we are being capable this month, of building the first quest from scratch and release it within 20 days, which is a great achievement judging by the fact that before having the frameworks we had to manually create every event when a player went from point A to point B and have this very slow programming development.
Also, with the help of our supporters through the years, we have been able to expand the team and in the past month, we got two new animators and a new character artist. With that in mind, we do know that what we aim to do can be completed since the speed things will be developing:You must be registered to see the links
Now about your ideas:
1 - Design around a central HUB:
This is not really necessary because Level Design is not a problem for us. We have people that can add new areas as long as they are not too big, and the core parts of what will be the place where our first chapter of the game will happen is already done.
So now our goal is to write down more quests and add more events happening in this world so the player who is exploring can find new content and quests to do. The story of this area is already written so changing the whole game to something like we can see in Dark Souls, where you have Firelink that is the main hub where you do everything wouldn't work for what we aim for.
2 - Radiant Dungeon combat Loop
Although I said that Level Design is not a problem for us at the moment, this is true because most of what we need is already done, and what we need to expand is only details here and there to add places of interest. If we go in a direction that we would count more with dungeons than a story for the player to explore, this would be way much more expansive and the time players would spend on the game would actually be smaller. For example, if we want to add another dungeon as big as the first one, our level designer would need to work more or less 2 months on it, and this would only add 20 minutes of gameplay at tops. And the other solution would be to hire more level designers or increase the time our current one can work on the project, and to do so we would need to take the budget away from the story writer, the animators and maybe even the programmer. It wouldn't be worth it because we have made several polls on our Patreon and people who follow us are more interested in the story and in having new cutscenes for them to watch.
3 - Companion progression through combat/romance
We have two different things planned on that side: On one hand, we will have main NPC characters that will react to Kalyskah's choice and follow her on the main plotline. On the other hand, we won't be having a companion system as you can see in games such as Skyrim. This means that the NPCs will be there in important times and important choices, but they won't follow Kalykah around for two big reasons: The first one is that the narrative we want to build is one where Kalyskah is trying to figure things out by herself on this changing world she woke up in. And the second one is because implementing a satisfying companion experience is something extremely complex and even AAA games can't get it right most of the time, which makes companions usually more annoying than helpful to the players.
Now about the framework, that we already got. The game might look small right now but there are many things in the back-end that are done. And now our job is pretty much to get the more quest written and put into the game while we fix bugs and add some polishment to areas that are needed. But the skeleton of what we need is there. Changing this skeleton would slow us down and also disappoint the people that are following our game for a while and are already aware of the direction we are going.
About the scope: I must that it is actually something feasible! We have people on the team that have been in the game's industry for quite a while and I myself am graduated in game design. That doesn't mean that we are not flawed, but it means that we can see what is and what is not possible for us to pull up judging by our capabilities, and in terms of mechanics, everything we are proposing to do are things that we know that given some time and working step by step, it can be done. =D
Female Protagonist framing
We are not planning to do either of those things you mentioned. Yes, right now at the dungeon we have the negotiation system with the acolytes where Kalyskah can charm them and then have sex. This is a thing that will eventually be removed from the game so we can implement the new mechanics: Where negotiation with seduction will be possible before the combat starts, but not after defeat. This way we won't make it look like she's being coerced into having sex, it will be written in a way where she's using her seduction skills to manipulate people.
About the "dumb slut" framing, Kalyskah is a smart woman. We don't have a corruption system on our game exactly because for many games the more corrupt the character gets, the dumber or the more controlled by their desires they will also get, and this usually means that players that are more interested in seeing the erotic content will feel like they don't actually have a choice.
So the way we are doing this is that Kalyskah will increase\decrease her compassion and her dominant personality during the game. That's because she is a vampire, and her choices spin more around whether she should treat humans as cattle or as friends. And her choice to have sex or to seduce won't be blocked by this mechanic. We consider that since the player is the one in control over Kalyskah, we don't want to make them feel like they have options blocked because they "didn't grinded slutness enough with random events".
About the protagonist choice:
Choosing between female, futa and male protagonists is an impossible task. This is about Kalyskah and her story. Giving a protagonist choice would be as if someone is wanting to play The Witcher with someone other than Geralt, which wouldn't work, would be a whole different game.
About what you wrote on "suck a guard's cock". Remember that in that particular scene, Kalyskah can actually go to the stables to pretend that she will do what the guard is asking her to do, but then she can just say "Change of plans" and bite him without even touching him. Also, even while she is at the scene, the player ALWAYS have the choice to stand up and leave or to bite him as well. So if Kalyskah will indeed blow him, is entirely on the player's hand.
I hope I could get some of your questions answered.
And as the consumer I'd like nothing more than to be proven wrong that you guys can fill out the worldspace you've committed to. What you have in it is good, but in the body of your response you give me further pause on several fronts.
I've been tangentially aware of development, but didn't follow it too closely, so i see how you might feel that saying the game is a product of your whole dev cycle would come off as a mischaracterization. But from the outside in that suggests something else, ballooning scope. That the game started as a 3D sidescroller (attainable) and has turned into a 3D sandbox over time plays into my fears about your project as a whole. A lot of work, but a lot of backtracking. Reinventing the game, redoing sections, redesigning systems. One of the things I'd have contacted you about is the state of your design bible for how you intended to address issues of scale to streamline and populate your worldspace, so hearing it's been rewritten adhoc isn't comforting.
per your response to my point 1
I mentioned White Orchard for a reason, and if you're a completionist or masochist you may have spent a lot of time there in witcher 3. Your starting zone shares some unfortunate similarities. It's large, but it's boring. Not just in content, but in framing. Your opening crypt sequence is thematic and interesting, suggesting a much different game feel than you get once you come out of it into the bright light of day. It's dark, it makes excellent work of it's architecture tileset, it has purposeful backtracking, the ability to approach encounters from different directions, etc.
Then in the main game loop you're walking, endlessly, between the small number of quest locations. To face enemy encounters that have been utterly trivialized by the powergap between that first dungeon, your equipment, and this lv0 starter town. Bright sunlight, woodland setting, the littlest whorehouse in the west? In a vampire game that out the gate led with summoning blood constructions and feeding on vampire hunters with succubus in tow? It isn't a good backbone hub for the game, white orchard, and utterly incompatible tonally. You want to leave it as soon as possible.
per 2
That is disappointing you see it that way.
My backseat gamedevving suggestion still would be to make these dungeon segments radiant and purposefully replayable. It's by far the best part of your game, even if it (currently) is not pornographic (which dovetails into my point3 and game construction for how they easily could be.)
If you give your backers a poll with the choices of "literally any porn" and "2 months on a new dungeon encounter" you know the answer you'll get. Don't stack the deck against yourself and your game like that.
This also eliminates the biggest problem with this early section
>RNG drops
killing 5 enemies gives you nothing or trash or godrolls and it encourages saveskimming. You don't even have a shop yet to rectify it, or source of income through respawning mobs anywhere. And too many armor sets (like the karstein one) that should only exist in one location in your gameworld. If you could pop back in on the dungeon and replay combat encounters, it wouldn't matter you had a bad run. Hell you have X many girls to find sexy armor for anyway.
If you structured your game around instanced dungeons instead of open world quests it would be better. Well designed dungeons that spit out porn and lewd armor alts, which is what the opening 30min of your game does, is what your opening gameplay sells and isn't what you've presented as your future roadmap.
This is fucking pretty
And apparently we'll never see it again. Or these enemy types, barring a reskin.
If it was an instanced repeatable dungeon that used magic abilities acquired later in the game progression to unlock new areas and get special gold loot for the girls this work wouldn't have been wasted on the dudeweedlmao quest alone.
per3
The main problem in your game is the inability to crack the age old problem of integrating conventional gameplay mechanics with pornography. You aren't succeeding to put it bluntly. Almost the only way you can is a companion system or coprotagonist relationship. If your combat playloop furthered a companion relationship with that companion relationship spitting out the sex scenes then you'd have your game systems working synergistically.
As it sits all scenes currently in the game are only accessible by making our protagonist temporarily become chaotic stupid and that isn't engaging. Why I come off hyperbolic about the "suck the guards cock or don't" being how you've colored her in the game we the player have seen so far.
the combination of 2 and 3, repeatable dungeons and a player-character relationships advanced through shared experience(literally) solve just about every glaring problem with your gameplay loop. And build on the strengths of your game; Dungeon design, the current combat system, the strong base characterization of your leading woman and her excellent VA.
if you had 4-5 dungeons of the complexity of your current ones, each with a boss encounter, each synergistically building the relationship you forge with nuanced temporary companions you interact with in a hub-overworld via dialogue and sidequest, you'd have a damn fine game.
20 minutes of gameplay played 4 times is an hour of gameplay. Especially when you employ the ole reliable of new abilities unlocking secret items/locations in older dungeons. Then you're in fucking business.
About the about the scope
See: white orchard
Your game is at it's best when you don't have a vampire running around a brightly lit forest biome.
And honestly I only scratched the surface of your fundamental scope problem. I wouldn't have put this much thought into your game if I didn't mean it constructively.
you'd need to recreate literally EVERY mechanic of vampire: the masquerade
I shouldn't be able to do this. Any of this.
>be wearing karstairn vampire queen armor in public
>eat a rat in broad daylight
>be in broad daylight
Or attack a guard instead of fuck them. Or accidentally bite people by pressing E when they 360 and moonwalk away to no consequence. Or... the list goes on. You have so much more on your plate than I went into as far as mechanics and world building.
And the fundamental problem, what does this have to do with the pornography?
>nothing
but it is all detractors to it.
Smaller scope with the same core systems: vampires vs vampire hunter faction 1-3, repeatable dungeon focus, companions as a vehicle for narrative and porn content.
Suddenly you don't have to worry about a complex web of vampire power witnessing with longterm gameplay effects. Or the fact you have to run around in the daylight. Or outfits that should cause gameplay problems. Or the myriad of other issues your scope foists upon you. Each one is going to have to be addressed to make the game you're aiming for yet none of it forwards content progression.
per per female protagonist framing
I understand sticking to a female protagonist, she's your poster girl, but paradoxically female protagonists are terrible for representing women in porngames.
Your desire to have her be a sum of player choices is coming from the right place, but you're missing one major element that submarines all female protagonist games.
If I'm interested in degredation content, I want to be the one doing the degrading.
If I'm interested in femdom content, I want to be the one femdommed.
etc. etc. Every fetish you're presenting in the wrong context and framing with a female protagonist for it's target market.And for the girls you could still have a girl protag option who gets to build meaningful erotic situations with the named, backstory having girls(/guys) of your game instead of oneoff nobodies. Everyone gets what they want when the flagship girl isn't the player protagonist.
And in general, if someone likes a character they don't want to put them in bad situations.Porn games, yours included, frequently suffer from a disconnect between viable gameplay an erotic content. As it sits post dungeon there is one viable way to play:
1. take offense at being called a slut and emasculate the guard
2. pay 50 gold for the information
3. get the gem fragment
4. threaten the blonde edgelord, beat down the bandits, get the ring
And you're practically done with your entire starter town, no second gem to find yet.And you can do that in 5 minutes.
Or be out time, lose ingame money, gain Tendency points you might not want, and be in the same place having seen a few disconnected porn scenes while not doing justice to the character.
It's massively discordant that you go from killing dozens of disciples, seekers, and your doggo in a darksouls bossfight...
...to being given a lv1 witcher 3 "moral quandary" about banditry presented by these morons. With the game insulting the character by suggesting she'd ever consider sex the solution here. Especially when the most moral and most viable gameplay strategy at the end of it all is to just You'd do her more justice as a character if she was a main companion to a blank, action defined protagonist. You'd be able to structure her and tell a compelling story instead of being pulled in a dozen directions to try and make one character be everything to everybody. And reduce meaningless sex and meaningless voiced NPCs by centralizing the pornographic content around a male(or female) unvoiced player character cycling through well flushed out, interesting female coprotagonists.
Whether you intended or not, every sex scene that isn't with the succubus requires her to be coerced, tricked, or trade her body to avoid death. There is no "regaining her power" moment to biting guardbro when she's been tricked in the first place. And mechanically you still lose those tendency points.
Sidebar: the BJ scene itself is great, as is her submissive dialogue and reactions to being treated collar'd. The problem as I referenced is she's saying those lines about some rando, not about a player foil. Everything in a female protagonist game is framed in reverse for every content type. A sadist has to play a submissive, a submissive a sadist, and middle of the road types avoiding almost all content or feeling disquiet about it.
Instead of her being the player character you could build her up constructively; reacting, fighting alongside, and building a rapport with the player as a main coprotagonist or central bestgirl of a companion system using her as the template.There is a lot of good you could do with the resources you've developed for the present game, but the level of work to flush out your starting town (much less propel the story to the lofty "rebuild the karstien legion" type endgame I'm sure you're envisioning) is simply monumental. It's a different tact than you're on, but there is a toptier readily achievable 15-30 hour companion based dungeon crawler/pornographic relationsim buried in the mechanics of your AAA scale game.
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I disagree with that. The first steps were when we were building a team and a base where we could build upon, also testing what works and what does not work. This is why the stage of prototyping is for. We've made some prototypes, put them out to see what would work. Made some changes on the team and here we are.
Actually, you will. We have some plans for new dungeons and there's a new one already mostly done that we just need to add some context before we make it playable:
We have a vampire hunter/crime system on our roadmap. Attacking people with normal weapons will be a normal crime, doing vampiric things will raise the player's exposure. So you know those guys in armour that you can see when you leave the dungeon? The Seekers? So, the idea is that they will be setting traps for you when you are not careful about what you are doing. About recreating every vampire the masquerade mechanics, we can't do it exactly like that because we don't feel like every single thing there is necessary for us since our vampires are different from the ones you can find there. And also because this could cause a lot of legal problems hahaha
That's good that you feel like Kalyskah will be offended, and that's why she has the option to intimidate him or even bite him
We can't do it in 5 minutes because we need to add context to the story. Level design is just the first step, now that we have it, we can add quests exploring it. Now about the gems, every new gem the player finds will give Kalyskah a new power and a new piece of information about her past. We can't rush things.
Kalyskah has a compassion mechanic is related to the endings the player will be able to achieve and also so the player can direct her character growth. And again, the consequences for killing NPCs is something that will be implemented in the future. I'm sorry but it appears like you are reviewing this game as if it's a full product while the fact is that we are still working towards adding this type of polishment. The basic mechanics of walking around, getting/completing quests, hitting things and having checkpoints are done. Story, spells and this life to the world is our next priority.
That's because of the polls we did from where to start with. Our Patrons wanted to see the branches where Kalyskah is submissive getting done first. Now that they are done, we are working on the branch of the heirloom lost quest where Kalyskah dominates Boris:
And the one where she can lay with the couple after getting everything back:
And there is more to come. What we want is to give our players a goood range of choices. They will be the ones who will decide if Kalysakh will be lying with everything that moves, if she will allow herself to be coerced or if she will never lower her head and rip the hearts of people who do thigns she doesn't want to... becuse yes! This is an option.
Look, I feel like you have good intentions. But honestly, I also feel like you have a concept of a whole different game that you would like to play and then you reviewed what we have here based on this concept... The concept you have might be a fun game, but is not the game we are bringing here or something we want to spend our time and resources to develop. Yes, what we plan to do is indeed a big game and we are fully aware of every technical detail we'll have to go through in order to pull that up. But we have been studying for years and we have tons of documentation and other things that details every step we need to take and also what is the story we want to tell.
We fully trust in our capacity to get this game done in the way we envision it and on the way that people who have been following us for years and participating in our polls and communicating with us want to see.
So with that said, I do think you made a good point on adding replayability to our dungeons and this is something we will think about to see how we can make it happen. Either by making enemies respawn or spawn with different sets of powers or something else. But we cannot, and we will not change the whole concept we have been working on for years. I understand that you might fear we can't accomplish this, so all I can do is to suggest you come back in six months to see how the game will grow. And to take into consideration that when you vote on something based on ideas you have that are so different than our actual game, you might be misleading people and harming our very capacity of getting the attention of the public to see what we do have.
Unclear language, the 5 minutes was referring to how long it takes to hypothetically speedrun most of the content in the town if you're playing the game vs hunting for porn, not how long it'd take to justify the next gem fragment. The next leg of the game will hopefully be longer than 5 minutes
The combat based mistweed quest is a good indication you're implementing more combat playloop segments to solve that problem present in the immediate post castle arc.I became intimately aware of it messing with different outfits and dialogue prompts to see how flushed out the wardrobe tag system is and other aspects of your systems. And poking around like that is what put me in the mindset that the scale being attempted has core flaws for your game design approach. One of the first things I did, gamermind, was check every building and openable door. In part to find a shop to offload all the iron swords cluttering the inventory, but also to see how sandbox of a game was currently implemented. So naturally I entered the pawn shop... and nothing happened. It was only after I'd whored her out (which is minorly bugged, the "ask about the stone" prompt never leaves the quest or inkeepers dialogue pool) or paid 50 gold
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More of a vibe check. These are perceptions based on the content you've released and content direction visible boots on the ground. You took notice enough to respond congenially so I can assume some of it you've given though to. Like you say, you've done a lot of prototyping to get to this stage. Now some of it can all be fluffed and buffed, given a onceover so existing content like above conforms to a sandbox quest approach, but scale balloons with every quest cross interaction unless they can be compartmentalized. The detailed, silent kind of work to make sure the player never notices the game constraints of your sandbox. Part and parcel for the game scale you're deadset on and immediately noticeable.
That from the outside seems like a bit of an overfocus. Considering the sex game framework and the tact you took for the gate guards of using your sexgame scenes with cinematic camerawork and dialogue. A very concise, efficient way to make interesting scenes out of on hand animation loops even if the girl one isn't quite polished. I'm sure you might toss that rig into the pool with the others after it's implemented, but designing scenes specifically around throwaway characters (the dual one is very situational) is the main thing that cocks my eye considering the size of the game you want to make. Common problem of female protagonist games, the shallowness of sex content because you can't truly build anything out of a character jumping from new guy to new girl to new guy infinitely. That's fine when something knows it's going to be moderately short and the main character is branded slooooot from the beginning (a game like wanderlust; also unity, 3D sandbox, combat playloop, companion element, and female protagonist) but in comes the scope of making a game in the 40+ hour range instead of the ~4 hour range.
I trust you on part of that, but other parts seem incongruous with your design decisions. From what I gleaned from patreon and your freelancer posting you're intending to try at 2 animations an update for instance, which will go far towards flushing out the game world, but then comes where you're placing them. How many scenes at 2 scenes a month will you need when you're introducing them through one time use characters? Over the full run of the game. 100? More?
You're familiar with the concepts of scalability of game systems. For rigged animation, assets, characters, voicework, etc.
Already you have a lot of stuff coming apart at the seams because one element is missing from the equation. Side quests without VA, quests without scenes like the content of the update you're promo'ing there. That's not something that is going to become less common with the given scope and this approach to content production.
Hypothetical
Change nothing about your playloop or game design, but replace what you're doing with side characters with 3 girls and 2 guys. Named, developed, important characters (faction leaders, quest givers) spread around your map with a quest structure around getting 5 scenes with them. 25 scenes in ~12 months with each scene having context and involving characters the player would have a connection with. Instead of X0 scenes pursuing shallow, ultimately pointless trysts with bandit3 and townsman8 and guard2.
Variety may be the spice of life, but for all the talk of meaningful choice across a sprawling narrative there is only one thing Lady Kalyskah becomes if she's hooked up with every guard, bandit, demihuman, and tavern wench on the continent. And your stat system will probably attest to it, pigeonholing her for dialogue and framing and reactions regardless.
That'll be a welcome addition. Few VA'd lines about "I won't let them suffer like this" and you'd be able to showcase one of the best parts of your game systems. If people feel they can fully experience the dungeons hell you might even find those polls skew a bit towards the combat mechanics based gameplay.
If you'll suffer another suggestion, add a treasure room or two you can only get to using that dash attack you get with the first acquired shard. Maybe a fixed chest spawn of the "enticing" "menacing" version of the karstairn plate armor pieces. One of it's current best elements was environmental backtracking to get to some of the storerooms.
And a combat side thing that would really add something to existing mechanics
>stealth bite kill via the sex combat menu
Solves your "no sex in the dungeon segments" problem pretty concisely
if you crouch or use the cntrl invisibility to bite an unaware mob, you should be able to kill them through keeping them "distracted" with idle hands while you drain them dry. Broken if another mob interrupts you or you run out of stamina. The way the first dungeon is structured it was a small disappointment the setup for a stealth assassinations is there but has no mechanic using the available systems.
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So, the idea is that we'll leave the cutscene sex scenes for things that will happen in the main quests or the ones that the characters would be in a very unique place. And the other sex scenes will be an expansion of the current sandbox system we have. We have some nice plans to expand that but we'll share the information once we have at least half of it done. What I can say is that it will have a lot of replayability =)
We have a list of 4 individuals that will be the core NPCs that the player will interact the most. So your hint is correct because that's the direction we are going: A small cast of important NPCs with more scenes, and then the scenes that will happen on the side-quests and side mechanics. This will help the player to have a group of characters that they will care more about.
This we won't be able to have because mixing sex with immediate violence is frowned upon especially by patreon. But there will be bite interactions on sex scenes, Kalyskah just won't kill the other NPC.
That's because the stealth mechanic is a pretty recent thing in our game. Eventually, we might have situations where mixing stealth with telekinesis might get some interesting combos and we also have a skill tree planned where Kaly will be getting some new powers and executions while in stealth. We are just focusing more on the story for now because sometimes it will naturally lead us to this kind of polishment required for the mechanics. For example, we have a quest planned where Kalyskah will need to infiltrate the Seeker's fort. So when it comes the time for us to do that quest, that's when we'll improve the feel of the stealth. Otherwise, we might spend too long working on mechanics without moving forward with the story.
No no no, you misunderstand. She'd simply sneak up behind them and seductively ask if they "want this" with a faction specific response to the affirmative about release or deep dark fetishes. Then they'd get sleepy after being masturbated and activate their teleportation crystal. Being bitten during? Don't kinkshame bro. Leaving their lootpool items? Accident. Teleportation sharing the same dissolve animation as death? Asset constraint.
While the erotic minigame implementation would be good and use existing elements, even a buff for being crouched (like being able to instakill humanoids, or at least a 50-75% health drain) would go a long way. It's completely possible to stealth bite with current mechanics, but that ~1/10th of the healthbar getting deleted is pretty wimpy compared to being an absolute blender doing anything else.
From what you've said it'll be interesting to see how the shapes up with the implementation of the elements you've described being in the works. The crux of it is what we're seeing now seems ill focused, but if you make that hard turn after these scenes to round out the sidequests are added (meaningful side characters as central quest progression and dungeon replayability) you'll be putting forward something with a lot more meat on it's bones and a brighter trajectory.
Kalyskah
I've also seen how you've all talked about restructuring and modifying the intro segment. Probably a good idea.
Your game is pretty heavily inspired by elements of the witcher and various assassins' creed games. Given that and the tone of the current intro, and fact it starts on James not kalyskah, a suggestion.
AC Syndicate didn't get much right, but in the midst of Ubisoft's internal refusal to make a female led game due to sales metrics during their "faux woke" scandal they accidentally created a very engaging coprotagonist system thats just about damn perfect for a porngame.
Jacob and Evie Fry are both the protagonist and the story cutscenes follow the pair of them. In the gameplay though you get the choice in each mission and overworld travel of choosing one of the pair. Then you have certain story and mechanics based missions that require playing as a specific twin.
Game structure follows
"intro"
"combat segment"
"outtro"
where you get back and forth and banter before and after every quest. You get one narrative, following two perspectives, with characterization flowing from game actions and their companionate relationship through cutscenes and interactive dialogue.
Your boy James and the way your current intro starts on him presents itself like it's cut from that same cloth.
Keeping to the same structure, tone, and fact James is clearly someone's OC and an intended male foil, fast-track upgunning him into full coprotagonist as kalyskah's window into the current world.
Following the AC Syndicate model, give the option to run the first dungeon as James or our vampiress. James suffering from his bite and trying to escape the dungeon, kalyskah doing her thing as is. James heading up, kalyskah heading down. End of dungeon for James being running into the bandits and succumbing to the bite before getting captured by the seekers, kalyskah playing with her doggo.
Intro - combat- outro structure to the current cutscenes. And allowing for the game to be about Kalyskah but viewable through an external foil from the start.
It seems you felt you didn't yet have a purpose for James while you slog through the early game white orchard quests, but his addition to this dynamic (saving the succubi for later, dungeon 2, even) would go far into making your early game feel meaningful.
Alternate early game framing
lets say instead of sending James away arbitrarily he becomes her thrall and guide to the current world. Paying for what he stole with body, blood, and his undeath.
1. You wander into the tavern-bandit autoplay event
You get some generalist prompts like "intercede" and "feed" for the reasoning and tact for the pair of them. Helping the people or not passing up the opportunity to feed. You get a back and forth between the pair and it starts to define the tact you're taking the narrative.
2. You get to the gate and are presented with your options to get into town.
Kalyskah takes point and leads the interaction with the guards unless she's wearing the collar. Collared the guard treats James as her master and she's stuck pretending because she needs to get into the town while preserving the "masquerade"
if you follow the quest prompt you get presented with their little shakedown. 1000 gold for the information miss fancypants needs or coming to an arrangement.
Attacked by bandits, their luggage and horses and wedding ring was stolen, etc. etc.
You mean this pack.jpg (see: D. solution for gate)
Wedding ring is lost forever *or* Kalyskah, empowered with the first fragment, has to go and fix Jame's mess. Uses vampire sight to follow footprints to the rings location, tutorializing that system.
Otherwise quest plays out as is. Option to fuck Boris, option to just kill all them like the guards want + James collecting on guardette's offer (which could help decide for various stat reasons if she/you both kill them, like not wanting her thrall to fuck random women because... uh... reasons ok!? Baka!) Option to threaten them, option to lose the ring/use vampire site without knowing the rough location. Ends with same contention about if you give them back the ring. Added element, James slips in for the husband in that 3way scene as "payment" if through the collar mechanic he's the one "making" decisions.
Now all this is pretty similar, with some added interrelation and consequence to quests, to what is already in game. Currently in game though all this content is contextless and tedius; besides plowing through it to get to more game tbd these "choices" are just numbers in a sub menu. But if the protagonist Kalyskah had a foil viewing her actions and making choices of their own within the narrative, suddenly the very same content goes from makework to highly engaging. It'd do something sorely lacking and very necessary thing, building relationships and characterization through gameplay and cutscene dialogue. This could also be done with the succubus, but it just wouldn't have the same impact: she has no connection to or stake in this world and lesbian content is niche.
It seems you intend a rather large role for James in the game. The game starts on him, he says the first lines, he introduces us to the world, and he facilitates the plot. Then he runs off into the woods with the "if you survive, find me" cutscene to an uncertain future. He slips seamlessly into the framework of your starting quests and would elevate them into proper story building, along with giving from minute one an external frame to view the goings on of Kalyskah in the worldspace.
I've also seen how you've all talked about restructuring and modifying the intro segment. Probably a good idea.
Your game is pretty heavily inspired by elements of the witcher and various assassins' creed games. Given that and the tone of the current intro, and fact it starts on James not kalyskah, a suggestion.
AC Syndicate didn't get much right, but in the midst of Ubisoft's internal refusal to make a female led game due to sales metrics during their "faux woke" scandal they accidentally created a very engaging coprotagonist system thats just about damn perfect for a porngame.
Jacob and Evie Fry are both the protagonist and the story cutscenes follow the pair of them. In the gameplay though you get the choice in each mission and overworld travel of choosing one of the pair. Then you have certain story and mechanics based missions that require playing as a specific twin.
Game structure follows
"intro"
"combat segment"
"outtro"
where you get back and forth and banter before and after every quest. You get one narrative, following two perspectives, with characterization flowing from game actions and their companionate relationship through cutscenes and interactive dialogue.
Your boy James and the way your current intro starts on him presents itself like it's cut from that same cloth.
Keeping to the same structure, tone, and fact James is clearly someone's OC and an intended male foil, fast-track upgunning him into full coprotagonist as kalyskah's window into the current world.
Following the AC Syndicate model, give the option to run the first dungeon as James or our vampiress. James suffering from his bite and trying to escape the dungeon, kalyskah doing her thing as is. James heading up, kalyskah heading down. End of dungeon for James being running into the bandits and succumbing to the bite before getting captured by the seekers, kalyskah playing with her doggo.
Intro - combat- outro structure to the current cutscenes. And allowing for the game to be about Kalyskah but viewable through an external foil from the start.
It seems you felt you didn't yet have a purpose for James while you slog through the early game white orchard quests, but his addition to this dynamic (saving the succubi for later, dungeon 2, even) would go far into making your early game feel meaningful.
Alternate early game framing
lets say instead of sending James away arbitrarily he becomes her thrall and guide to the current world. Paying for what he stole with body, blood, and his undeath.
1. You wander into the tavern-bandit autoplay event
You get some generalist prompts like "intercede" and "feed" for the reasoning and tact for the pair of them. Helping the people or not passing up the opportunity to feed. You get a back and forth between the pair and it starts to define the tact you're taking the narrative.
The choice of why you helped decides in the tavern what is said during the "what is your plan" conversation, now between someone disconnected from the world and someone who's struggling with no longer being part of it.
2. You get to the gate and are presented with your options to get into town.
Kalyskah takes point and leads the interaction with the guards unless she's wearing the collar. Collared the guard treats James as her master and she's stuck pretending because she needs to get into the town while preserving the "masquerade"
A. Pay 500 gold (more than you have from the first dungeon)
B. Well miss perhaps we could come to an arrangement/Unless you want your slave to pay with that mouth of hers
C. (James, collar route only) Offer your services instead. Price goes to 1000 gold, but the female guard propositions James. (which will play the blowjob rigging) Kalyskah is disgusted with you and a bit turned on
D. Actually we have a problem that needs dealt with: wipe out the bandit camp. (collar route, female guard (still) offers to fuck james to sweeten the pot to guard1's exasperation)
E. Call bluff (noncollared only) where kalyskah emasculates the guard and the scam is never pulled on her. James though, he still has to pay the nonexistant entry fee. Gets to sit outside until Kalyskah/the player sells some iron swords and feels he's needed in town.
D. Wipe out the bandit camp Witcher style consequence time.
To avoid paying gold you need to wipe out the bandits. What no one told Kalyskah is they're across that little babbling brook. It's incredibly painful to cross running water as a diminished vampire, so... good thing she has James.
James has to find the narrowest part of the river to ford so he doesn't die in the process (why you can't just swim across the lake) and trek back to the camp the long way.
No autoplay cutscene prompt, seems a simple killquest like the dungeon, but turning over their corpses he does find a quest item of a pack of supplies with a crest on it. neat.jpg
bandits easily dispatched and with enough blood to survive crossing the river, he heads back to the gate
3. sleezy tavern people if you follow the quest prompt you get presented with their little shakedown. 1000 gold for the information miss fancypants needs or coming to an arrangement.
A. this tutorializes repeating dungeons. Go back to the castle, "release" more of Kalyskah's followers, and go full loot goblin as Kalyskah or James. Intro-combat-outro cutscenes outside the dungeon of them bickering over who and why they're going back to the dungeon. ("Choice" decisions and banter like contention between James being flippant about looting her castle, Kalyskah feeling she has a duty to release her former followers through death, etc.)
Get more iron swords, get another crack at finding slutty armor, sell the trash items, pay the bribe.
B. Kalyskah works as a tavern wench (optionally still having to wear the collar because "the guards think you're my slave, do you really want them to ask questions?") and seduces clients. James optionally encouraging this if it's the collar route or having misgivings if she's being "empowered" about it all.
C. Read the wiki/exploration/stat and mechanics based solution
Mechanics: The sun constantly drains health unless you're fully unerotically covered. (witches hat+shawl that replaces chest slot with a 0armor, -5charisma sunproof item) Or you can stave off the rapid health drain through the Alt blood consumption mode.
The pawn shop is only open during the day whereas the tavern interactions are set at night/meant to make you treat the day-night cycle diurnally
If you visit the Pawn shop during the day it will trigger the same Gem fragment tradeoff as getting the information to tell you to do this, but you won't have the option to break into the pawn shop at night(an additional element, opening up a slightly different interaction with the blonde from the inside of her shop instead of through the bars. Once again whipping boy James made to do something hazardous to his health like enter a dwelling uninvited to find the idol. A reason kalyskah would have to pay his town entrance fee.)
4. The young bereaved couple bump into kalyskah in the hallwayAttacked by bandits, their luggage and horses and wedding ring was stolen, etc. etc.
You mean this pack.jpg (see: D. solution for gate)
Wedding ring is lost forever *or* Kalyskah, empowered with the first fragment, has to go and fix Jame's mess. Uses vampire sight to follow footprints to the rings location, tutorializing that system.
Otherwise quest plays out as is. Option to fuck Boris, option to just kill all them like the guards want + James collecting on guardette's offer (which could help decide for various stat reasons if she/you both kill them, like not wanting her thrall to fuck random women because... uh... reasons ok!? Baka!) Option to threaten them, option to lose the ring/use vampire site without knowing the rough location. Ends with same contention about if you give them back the ring. Added element, James slips in for the husband in that 3way scene as "payment" if through the collar mechanic he's the one "making" decisions.
Now all this is pretty similar, with some added interrelation and consequence to quests, to what is already in game. Currently in game though all this content is contextless and tedius; besides plowing through it to get to more game tbd these "choices" are just numbers in a sub menu. But if the protagonist Kalyskah had a foil viewing her actions and making choices of their own within the narrative, suddenly the very same content goes from makework to highly engaging. It'd do something sorely lacking and very necessary thing, building relationships and characterization through gameplay and cutscene dialogue. This could also be done with the succubus, but it just wouldn't have the same impact: she has no connection to or stake in this world and lesbian content is niche.
It seems you intend a rather large role for James in the game. The game starts on him, he says the first lines, he introduces us to the world, and he facilitates the plot. Then he runs off into the woods with the "if you survive, find me" cutscene to an uncertain future. He slips seamlessly into the framework of your starting quests and would elevate them into proper story building, along with giving from minute one an external frame to view the goings on of Kalyskah in the worldspace.
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- Jul 27, 2017
- 154
- 343
Whenever I see a wall of text it reminds me of this quote: "If I had more time, I would have written a shorter letter." I don't like using quotes, but I enjoy this one. I'm not trying to put anyone down. It takes an extreme amount of time and effort to condense a lot of information down into a concise statement.
Those two options were in the game back when we were scaling the breast bones instead of using morph targets to make them have a better look and also have physics. Trust me, the breasts used to look very bad when we had those options and moving those sliders were necessary to try to achieve a more natural look xD
so is this the area with bdsm dungeon? also are there more quests implemented?
i tried the new version and after going out of the dungeon and meeting james i couldnt get into the city the guard wouldbt let me amd kalyskah would walk way. In the old version i remember first killing a couple bandits and saving an old man near a inn/tavern but i couldnt get this event in this version has it been removed or did i encounter a bug?